Home Page - 2002-06-30

...Kolam, is a regular
Tamil word (maybe other South Indian languages too might be sharing this word with
minor variations). I didn't even try to translate this name into English, for this
project, as Kolam is pretty unique to this part of the world. Of course, I've seen
similar art forms with knots and curves in some Inca related pages in web. I guess
the Arabs too have similar graphic art forms (which is evident in some great mosques
that are in India). All the same, I guess, no where else in the world, is the
Kolam like art form as alive and a day-to-day affair, as it is in India...

I think this symmetry part has been used extensively by the kolam creators. But,
this is not enough. You need more patterns to make kolam drawing as simple as
connecting points with line. If you see the above figure, I've specifically shaded the
closed areas that contain the dots ('Pullie' in Tamil). This way you can see clearly
that a kolam is just a connected network of many 'bubbles' (if you can call these
shaded parts so). This is important because, this way you only have to join
different dots creatively, and the regulation part of weaving the curve around them
could be automated. This is not to say that joining dots is easy, because
traditionally only certain dot-connections are considered beautiful. You are free
to explore, but don't blame me, if your mom gives an indifferent glance to your
masterpiece. The above are some frequent and pleasing connections of dots.

Very simply put, music that we hear, has three aspects to it. The Pitch, Volume and
Timbre. Volume as we know is the loudness.
The Pitch is the most important aspect of sound that makes us enjoy music.
This is the granule of any melody. Another name for pitch is frequency, which
is just the number of beats per second. It is measured in Hertz (Hz) which is again
just the cycles per second. The Timbre is the quality that
differentiates a song played with different instruments. There is whole lot of
physics due to Helmholtz which says that Timbre is just a particular combination of
pitches or frequencies. The fourth aspect that is not exactly a quality of sound, but
crucial for music is the timing. How long a note (pitch) has to play, or not play,
is a vital factor.